When I was a kid, I knew who the assholes were. My father would tell me. The guy renting an apartment from us who ran up the account at the hardware store then refused to pay his last four months' rent because of an argument over an auger. A drunk pro-lifer who refused to stop talking at cocktail parties. The menagerie of people who wrote to the newspaper arguing their hobbyhorse passions: gun control, commingling of the races, taxes, uncontrolled blaring of music from car windows. "Asshole," my dad would mutter as he folded the paper on them, or closed the door on them, or turned away from a conversation over a mutual fence. And when prodded, he'd identify the person, explain his reaction. An asshole was intolerant, intrenchant, single-minded, and without empathy. An asshole had only one goal in life: to get what he wanted no matter what it did to others. Assholes were not to be feared. Because no one respected them, no one would listen. There weren't that many of them, for one thing. My dad just went back to work in spite of all that. Most people — in public life and private — were okay in his book.

Somewhere along the way to now, the ranks swelled, and the world we know — the world we see on television — was overtaken by assholes. Lying baseball players, carping congressmen from districts redrawn by other carping congressmen, news reporters tweeting their bare chests, politicians tweeting their bare chests, anyone tweeting their bare chest, empty-eyed twits vying to marry a person they were introduced to on network television, sour-faced politicians who stroke themselves for their ability to obfuscate truth and delay change, liberals who defend a president who incarcerates and murders without explanation, preachy, carping, loudmouthed cable-TV-show "hosts" who urge their audience to fear ambiguity, to embrace extremism. Those who want to succeed. Radio talk-show hosts — just them in general and on the whole. Dopey mayors. Opinionated Internet stalkers. People who hashtag. Blank-eyed man-on-the-street interviewees who hold forth for television reporters on any subject that happens across their Twitter feed. Rich white haircuts who bring us sports results without pleasure, amazement, or unrehearsed reflection, armed with clubby zingers and one-liners designed to contribute only to their own network immortality.

And that's just one spin through the channels offered by my cable provider. They're everywhere. And I could name them. So could you. You don't live in their world unless you recognize what a collection of assholes we have. Where did they come from? How did we let them in? There are answers. But anyone who pretends to have one is most likely just another asshole. So I've gone my father's way, closing the door, turning the page, turning off the television, going back to work, muttering to myself what I insist on every damned day: Most people are okay in my book. I have to believe that still.